By Walter SalmSacramento, CA — It's happening right now — fuel cell cars are being offered for sale by Toyota in California. Prices for fuel cell stacks have been dropping with almost predictable regularity, and the new Toyota Mirai can be purchased for just $58,325 or leased for $499 a month ...

By Mark RichardsA firm that started over 38 years ago in an apartment-sized facility has grown into a well-established, electronic manufacturing services (EMS) company serving military, aerospace, medical, consumer, and industrial markets from a 20-acre, 33,000-square-ft. manufacturing operation in ...

By Jacob FattalApopka, FL — Located only a few miles north of Orlando, Best Global Source (BGS) is a full-service electronic contract manufacturer (ECM) that specializes in printed-circuit-board (PCB) assembly and electro-mechanical box builds. Founded in 2000, the minority-owned small business ...

By Steve LeberstienMunich, Germany — Silicon. It's the 2nd most plentiful element in the earth's crust. We see it and use it everywhere in compounds and certainly in electronics, and hardly ever give a thought to where it comes from or how it managed to get into our lives.

The pedigree of Silicon and
its importance in the world of electronics was certainly driven home
during a recent high-level press conference given by Wacker, a company
that has been a major consumer of silicon material and has now upped its
ante by acquiring more sources of this common but crucial metallic
element.

By Jacob FattalA big question at SMT Nuremberg, "Is the In-Line X-Ray system now obsolete?" was answered at the kickoff by SmartLoop, Sales Director, Keith Bryant as he opened the Global Press Launch of what could be a game-changing new testing methodology that relies on products from Mirtec and Yxlon. Bryant ...

By Jacob Fattal
Fremont, CA — It was bound to happen. After all, the bulk of Juki's business has been in California's Silicon Valley for years and, in fact, West Coast customers had been serviced from a stocking distribution site in Fremont. Now that role has been vastly expanded with the official opening ...

By Walter SalmSacramento, CA — Fuel cell powered automobiles are very hungry for hydrogen and a badly needed infrastructure is being put in place in fits and starts. With nine operational hydrogen filling stations, California has more such installations than any other state in the U.S. And it ...

By Megan Jurgens, SyncronOnshoring has many faces, and the most important one is to simply keep the business at home, providing jobs that had flown overseas for many years. There are several aspects to this, most importantly to provide customer OEMs with exactly the product they want without delays, language ...

By Jacob Fattal Amberg, Germany — It's been the worst-kept secret in the industry, in fact it was "announced" prematurely at productronica last November, but now it's really official: ASM has acquired DEK in a move to provide an integrated production line solution for its customers. The "official ...

By Walter SalmWichita, KS — Something new, wonderful and breathtaking has happened in the U.S. aerospace industry. After years of budget fights, many billions of tax dollars spent, and mostly wasted on new military fighter planes that still are far from ready to use, and may never actually see ...

Albuquerque, NM — Humans have used metals for thousands of years, but there's still a lot about them that isn't fully understood. Just how much stretching, bending or compression a particular metal will take is determined by mechanical properties that can vary widely, even within parts made of the ...

By John Redding and Walter SalmPhoenix, AZ — The process for designing, building and maintaining military systems can be lengthy and difficult. So when a system works and works well, it is not replaced by snazzy new equipment every few months the way consumer electronics products are. Instead, it is repaired, ...

Albuquerque, NM — A surprising effect created by a 19th-Century device called a Helmholz coil offers clues about how to achieve controlled nuclear fusion — a discovery made at Sandia National Laboratories, using its powerful "Z" machine.

Albuquerque, NM — When is a nuclear test not a nuclear test? That all depends on your viewpoint. Tests are performed in miniature by Sandia's Z machine — reportedly the most powerful laboratory producer of X-rays on Earth. The large accelerator regularly examines plutonium to study the fissile ...

By Walter SalmDenver, CO — End-of-life management of electronics, or lack thereof, has become a serious part of our overall ecological contamination. It's no longer enough to simply consign junked electronics to landfills — even after shredding. The landfills after all can accommodate only ...

By Jim Jackson, PECamdenton, MO — American students still lag alarmingly behind students in China and Western Europe, reports several student testing services. While there has been a small improvement in U.S. high school student performance, there's still a great deal of work ahead if the U.S.A. is ...

By Lee Mathiesen, Operations Manager, Lansdale Semiconductor, Inc., Phoenix, AZWashington, DC — The latest twist in the counterfeit war — and make no mistake, it is a war — has been an August 2012, notification posted by DLA (Defense Logistics Agency) DIBBs board that all FSC 5962 product sold directly to DLA would require DNA marking beginning November ...

Atlanta, GA — The message was loud and clear at a recent ribbon-cutting and seminar in Suwanee, Georgia: manufacturing in the U.S. is having a marked resurgence, and Siplace is going to be a major contributor to this growth with its cutting-edge automated assembly equipment.

Siplace had been a Siemens company for many years, but the ownership changed hands in January, 2011 when Siplace was purchased by ASM Pacific Technology, a Hong Kong-based company. At the time, there was concern that a change in ownership would bring nothing but cutbacks and problems.